Five short years ago, Grizzly Bear played before a transfixed and adoring audience of perhaps 100 people on the cramped stage of Club Dada. Touring to support their break-through album Yellow House, the band brought to stage the unique and peculiar blend of soaring vocals, tight harmonies, literate lyrics and…
Dallas’ own Drowning Pool has a new album — its first with lead singer Jasen Moreno. He’s the fourth man to fill that spot and the transitions haven’t always been easy or smooth. But the band is clearly comfortable with Moreno. Comfortable enough to take a crack at an unrehearsed…
Editor: April showers, right? But a little water isn’t stopping anyone, which is good because there are excellent shows happening this week. Including the blissfully strange Danny Brown, touring with beat master and unexpected meme star Baauer. -topic and his TeamFromNoWhere are throwing a party on Saturday at Club Dada…
Consider the damn state of things when a songwriter with a decade-plus experience, in front of an adoring sellout crowd at the Granada Theater, says the following halfway through his set: “Alright, we’re gonna do a Harlem Shake video.” Bob Schnedier pulled on a Luchador mask after he said it…
Editor: Welcome to our weekly rundown of our nine favorite shows, all of which are better than this new Lil’ Wayne album. It’s terrible, guys. If you’re looking for loud, head to Dada for The Casualties and awesome friends. If you’re looking for something a little more multi-generational on this…
You, as a resident of Dallas, should know the story of the Relatives by now. For anyone that doesn’t, a quick refresher — formed in the 1970s and dissolved in 1980, the Relatives, led by the Reverend Gean West, left little evidence of a mesh of gospel and funk that…
On the main stage of Billy Bob’s Texas, past the mechanical bulls and the neon lights and the line-dance floors throbbing to the “Cha-Cha Slide,” Randy Travis, the reed-thin king of country, looked out onto the crowd of thousands he still drew in the twilight of his career. Through the…
We’re changing it up here a bit, guys. For the past several months you’ve seen two blog posts outta me each week, breaking up the area’s best concerts into two separate blog posts: Freakin’ Weekday and Freakin’ Weekend. Starting today, you’ll get just one: Freakin’ Week; which is a go-to…
Last night, Eric Clapton and Dallas-born guitarist Doyle Bramhall II set fire to their Stratocasters’ fretboards. Their fingers slid across the neck, bending strings until they bled the blues. Feeding off a musical energy straight from the Crossroads, the talented guitarists empowered some of Clapton’s greatest hits with a musical…
You did St. Patrick’s day. Now you feel rough. If only, you think to yourself, there was some sort of beach where I could relax with a cheap cocktail on the sand and maybe listen to some music. But you’re in Dallas, and you’re at least five hours drive from…
This was my first time braving Greenville for St. Patrick’s. I was expecting it to be bad. What I was not expecting was the last days of Sodom and Gomorrah. As I, the only sober person on the entirety of Greenville, struggled through a crowd roughly comparable to the population…
Snoop Dogg delivered an hour-plus of his finest yesterday on Greenville Avenue for the Observer St. Patrick’s Day Concert. We had a fine contingent of writers there, but I, your highly addled editor, was sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on I-35 on the Megabus headed back from Austin. Throughout the afternoon,…
A spitting, snarling, unbridled Nick Cave stalked McFarlin Auditorium last night, displaying the same unmatched punk fury he’s been doling out since The Birthday Party. Audience members got abused. Cave thrust his crotch everywhere. He sung particularly intense lyrics directly into the faces of people in the front row, leaning…
Tanqueray-and-chronic time is fast approaching, but you’ll need to arm yourself with all the important details before setting off for our sold-out St. Patrick’s Day Concert on Saturday, headlined by a little rapper named Snoop Dogg. Here are the answers to your many questions. Got more? Ask them in the…
The tech crew is rushing around to get things started. Some of them are on the floor, frantically trying to get the fog machines going, and others are hanging from the ceiling checking the ginormous speakers from above. The fog begins to fill the stadium and the lights begin to…
Update, 3:12 p.m. And it’s sold out! See you all Saturday. Original post follows… Long Beach’s finest will grace the stage at the Energy Square Parking Lot in two days, and he will not be alone. Fewer than 200 tickets remain for the show as of this writing. So if…
On Saturday, as the rain poured outside of the historic Southfork Ranch in Parker, just east of Plano, nothing could dampen the beautiful and electric vibes inside the complex’s conference center where the annual Texas Music Revolution (hosted by KHYI 95.3 The Range) was taking place. The 17th edition of…
We’re eight days from Dallas’ favorite family-friendly holiday. And with it comes the Snoop Dogg concert we’ve been telling you about for several weeks now. Get excited, everybody: Tickets are $15 and on sale now…
“Even though you think its cold, it’s not cold”, Efterklang’s Casper Clausen admonished the full house at Dan’s Silverleaf. Hailing from Denmark and having spent time above the Arctic Circle, he knows of what he speaks. The dapper Clausen and band mates Rasmus Stolberg on bass and Mads Bauer on…
J. Paul Slavens has a combination of charisma and sarcasm that is enough to leave any audience in stitches. Slavens made a name for himself in the ’80s as a member of the popular North Texas band Ten Hands and has since had a career as a composer, radio show…
It was symbolic in more ways than one. The sweet and skunky smell of high quality weed that hit you upon entering the Granada last night provided a kind of bridge back to the ’60s and early ’70s. The music of that era has provided the DNA for the woozy…
Editor: Erykah Badu played a birthday show last night at the Granada. Two of those in the sold-out crowd were DC9 at Night writers Vanessa Quilantan and Deb Doing Dallas, who set up camp on the balcony. Here is their report. Deb Doing Dallas: Going to an Erykah Badu show…
